Old Dongola Field Manual

The manual was created for the needs of the ERC Starting Grant ‘UMMA. Urban Metamorphosis of the community of a Medieval African capital city’, carried out in Old Dongola under the auspices of the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, University of Warsaw, and led by Artur Obłuski, Project Director. UMMA (Arab. community) is a multidisciplinary project aimed as the first study of the liminal phases of a Christian African community inhabiting Dongola, the economic, administrative and religious centre of the kingdom of Makuria, and subsequently the Kingdom of Dongola, located in modern-day Sudan. The Polish expedition has been excavating Old Dongola for over 50 years, but given the relatively small size of the team no extensive written manual was necessary. With the launch of the UMMA project and substantial enlargement of the endeavour both in terms of team size and area under excavation, such a manual was deemed necessary. The system implemented by the manual was to enable the management and verification of a substantial volume of finds and information. This manual is a guide to excavating and creating records of fieldwork using the ‘single context’ system at Dongola. This system of organization was compiled for internal use of the project on the basis of the Museum of London Archaeology system and the team members’ experiences working in the Nile Valley, i.a. in the Dakhla Oasis (Amheida, Ain el-Gedida), Giza and Tell el-Retaba, as well as Ghazali and Dongola itself. Elements of these systems were combined and adjusted to best suit the excavation of a medieval urban site in Sudan. This manual is designed for use in the field and describes the methods and techniques of excavation, recording and handling finds. The sections concern the excavation of stratigraphically defined deposition contexts and more complex features (structures, pits), as well as related archaeological activities: sampling, recording, finds recovery and documentation, photography, and data digitising and storage (see www.daisy.uw.edu.pl).